BLACK v. WHITE

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6544, 28 February 1928, Page 10

BLACK v. WHITE

SOUTH AFRICA'S TROUBLES. POTENTIAL BATTLE GROUND. One o£ the last articles mitten by the late Robert Keablo was a political review of South Africa’s troubles, a country with which ho was well acquainted. He wrote: “South Africa is usually i known to the average American as the scene of the 300-year-old quarrel between Britain and Boer that produced the Great Trek, a couplo of wars, the reconciliation that made the Union of South Afriea, and bids fair to flame again in the recent flag controversy. “But Is has a still greater interest for us as being the potential battleground between black and white that meet there as they do not meet elsewhere in the world. “This also has been a centurylong affair. The' South African has had to struggle with that problem, both under British and Boer regime, and neither side has been able to settle it. Two books have just appeared that deal most timely with the question, one by Professor Macmillan ‘The Cape Colour Question,’ and the other by one of the most interesting personalities in Africa south of the Equator, Rev. Arthur S. Cripps, ‘An Africa for Africans.’ Mr. Cripps is an Englishmen with an inordinate love of the English countryside in his blood. The fields and lanes of Kent and Surrey awake in him something of the intense love and devotion that a Frenchman feels for France, and which we more phlegmatic Anclo-Saxons rarely, give expression. Thus while taking brilliant honours at Oxford University he won several university prizes for poems expressing his love of Englaau. “It is therefore all the more interesting that ho shuld have surrendered the whole of his adult life to Africa. He has lived and worked since his ordination among the Mashtma of Suthem Rhodesia, retaining his scholarship and his love of poetry, and brimming over now and again in passionate little books in which the two loves of his life are intermingled. On the parched, stony African Weld he ever remembers the depths of the English woods and possibly because he is so passionate an Englishman he has identified himself so wholly with the cause of his Mashona. “The situation in Southern Rhodesia is to-day the situation that has been disastrously lost in the Union of South Africa. One has there some 32.000 whites and rather more than 800.000 blacks, and while the blacks have so far remained living freely on their own territory, and constituting a labour reserve for the whites, the tendency of the whites is to oncoach more y and more upon their territory. “This was exactly the situation round the Capo of Good Hope, a century ago. “In that Capo Colony a century ago only the wisest heads foresaw the inevitable result. At first all went swimmingly, but inevitably causes of trouble- showed themselves and developed. The black man increasingly acquired education and acquisitiveness; the white man increasingly encroached on native territory; and there grew up an increasingly large gray population, which was despised by white and black alike, and had neither pot nor lot with cither.’’